It was announced that the Windows Live division has partnered with five social networks - LinkedIn, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and Tagged to facilitate address book portability, as a part of the commitment to supporting data portability initiatives. Using the Windows Live Contacts API, announced at this month's MIX08, the users of the social networks can easily import their Windows Live contacts into the social network web sites. Starting today, you can visit www.facebook.com and www.bebo.com to find your friends using the Windows Live Contacts API.  Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn will be live in the coming months.

Additionally, a new site, Invite2Messenger, will let social network users invite their friends from their social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list. As of today, Facebook works, with the other networks coming soon.

This 2-way street for moving relationships from site to site is more secure than other methods, like "screen scraping," which is the term used to describe the process of allowing one site access to your address book by providing your login credentials (or vice versa). This new process respects your privacy while still allowing for the open flow of data.

With all of the buzz about FriendFeed in the blogosphere lately (guilty!), Mary Jo Foley's article on C2 ("Microsoft's Take on FriendFeed) peaked my interest. C2, recently unveiled at this month's TechFest, is a social network data aggregation service built by Microsoft Research. The service would aggregate data from across the social web - Facebook, MySpace, flickr, Spaces, etc. as well as from your "personal social network" of email and IM. Not only that, but the service would work online, on your desktop, or on your mobile phone or PDA.

The C2 project features three parts: aggregation, with a sharing privacy model; user experience; and a unified model for traditional and emerging communication tools, such as e-mail, social networks, and instant messaging. Beyond that, not much is known and no online demo is currently available.

In order for a Microsoft Research project to become a commercial product, it is often first be shown off at research fairs like TechFest, where a Product team may decide to pick it up and commercialize it. Pick this one up, I say.

From the sounds of C2, it would be like FriendFeed on steroids - not only social networks integration (hopefully you'll include twitter)  but email and IM, too? If you add in sharing links and shared RSS posts, then I would have to say that could be a killer app. If it offered everything FriendFeed does plus the additional items, and the online/offline availability, then it would have great potential to be an example of "Microsoft cool."

Let's see this thing launched already - call it beta and put it out there!